Understatement of the year. What app there do you think would attract newcomers to the platform? What apps offered are demonstrably superior to its iPad/Android counterparts?

And yes, comparing the OSX store to the Windows store is pointless right now. If the WinRT API extends to the point where functional desktop apps can be built with it, then it will be relevant. Right now the comparison should be between the iOS store and Metro.

Understatement of the year. What app there do you think would attract newcomers to the platform? What apps offered are demonstrably superior to its iPad/Android counterparts?

And yes, comparing the OSX store to the Windows store is pointless right now. If the WinRT API extends to the point where functional desktop apps can be built with it, then it will be relevant. Right now the comparison should be between the iOS store and Metro.

Well in all app stores the vast majority of apps are crap. App quality will always be a function of total number of apps. That's why I say it can only get better as more and more devs start kicking the tires on Windows 8.

This does not quite follow. Competition no doubt helps app quality yes, and to a decent extent, but it's not the only metric to determine quality. They can be separate. Android has quite a large marketplace now - do you think the quality of its apps are comparable to iOS at the moment?

Lets's take OSX as an example. Despite having a miniscule market share compared to Windows, it has always had a reputation for having a polish in its software that speaks well beyond its market share. Naturally if a title you want doesn't exist on it it doesn't matter how polished the "other" apps are, but IME at least for smaller titles in the shareware vein, this holds true. I've found most of the smaller apps for OSX tend to be far more polished than their Windows counterparts.

There's a few reasons for this - having a good percentage of its users in the 'creative' space, providing all dev tools completely free, a culture of emphasizing the user experience, etc. But I believe the biggest one is this - the company than owns the store sets the example by making their apps the highest quality. Apple didn't open up the iOS store and leave it barren for devs to populate, it started first and foremost by making its own apps the benchmark standard and updating them often. Pages/Numbers/Keynote for iOS. Mail. iLife equivalents. iBooks. Newstand. iTunes U.

These apps were best-of-breed on the iOS store, and for the most part have been continuously updated.

They learned this from OSX, where they didn't sit around and lament the lack of developer interest in their platform, they just made the apps themselves or went out and bought companies and updated their products to conform to their own user interface guidelines (and usually reduced the price significantly). They controlled their own destiny.

Now, compared to MS's offerings? Perhaps Onenote MX could be regarded as polished...but christ, everything else is a giant fucking mess. It's really just pathetic. Yes, they are updating them, and we'll see what this big update brings - but it's been 6 bloody months.

The point is that at launch, even disregarding third party apps, the iPad had good, quality apps that were decently refined OOTB. Whether or not MS agrees with this approach is irrelevant, as usual they're falling down in execution.

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That's why I say it can only get better as more and more devs start kicking the tires on Windows 8.

Android has quite a large marketplace now - do you think the quality of its apps are comparable to iOS at the moment?

Absolutely! This is a criticism of Android that has long, long since died.

Throatwobbler Mangrove wrote:

Lets's take OSX as an example. Despite having a miniscule market share compared to Windows, it has always had a reputation for having a polish in its software that speaks well beyond its market share. Naturally if a title you want doesn't exist on it it doesn't matter how polished the "other" apps are, but IME at least for smaller titles in the shareware vein, this holds true. I've found most of the smaller apps for OSX tend to be far more polished than their Windows counterparts.

Well, you have to admit that is pretty subjective. If a Windows user told you that he feels Windows apps are more polished you'd have a pretty hard time proving it either way. The windows platform is estimated to be home to some 4 million applications So the chances are high that I could just as easily find Windows applications that either don't exist for OSX or are far more polished than their OSX counterparts.

Throatwobbler Mangrove wrote:

There's a few reasons for this - having a good percentage of its users in the 'creative' space, providing all dev tools completely free, a culture of emphasizing the user experience, etc. But I believe the biggest one is this - the company than owns the store sets the example by making their apps the highest quality. Apple didn't open up the iOS store and leave it barren for devs to populate, it started first and foremost by making its own apps the benchmark standard and updating them often. Pages/Numbers/Keynote for iOS. Mail. iLife equivalents. iBooks. Newstand. iTunes U.

I agree.

Throatwobbler Mangrove wrote:

Now, compared to MS's offerings? Perhaps Onenote MX could be regarded as polished...but christ, everything else is a giant fucking mess. It's really just pathetic. Yes, they are updating them, and we'll see what this big update brings - but it's been 6 bloody months.

I'd say this number overstates the number of "Metro" apps available to an end user. If I go into the Windows Store and in the settings charm set my preference to "Make it easier to find apps in my preferred languages" and then do a search of the Windows Store using "*" as the search term, as of today I only see just over 27,000 results. Maybe a lot of those 50,000 apps are not in my preferred language? Further, many of the listings are for "desktop apps" which means the number of "Metro" apps I can find at present are less than 27,000.

I found the move to Windows 8 to be pretty simple after about ten minutes of fiddling. I like Windows 8. I'm honestly bewildered at the hostility that it has engendered. However, I will say that right now my single biggest disappointment in Windows 8 is the sputtering development of the Metro app eco-system. All the money Microsoft is throwing at advertising telling us how cool Metro is will be for naught if ultimately there is no "there" there.

I think Metro apps will become more and more popular and useful once the market has shifted to using touchscreen devices running Win8 more, simply because a lot of people have no damn use for a huge full screen app with big touch friendly buttons on most of their current Windows PCs.

I have a range of PCs running Win8, and it ranges from Metro = useless on the desktop, 14 inch laptop, but then becomes useful on 10 inch travel laptop.

I do like the fact that MS is starting to tie together those PCs though, and generally Win8 is a nice step forward.

Desktop users probably don't care, but laptop users do. And a lot of other factors have to come together before power savings are realized on any particular piece of hardware, including properly-behaving drivers and no legacy apps running in the background messing up the situation.

Process lifetime management isn't just about battery life either, it's also about your PC not slowing down over time, not having to worry about closing / when to close apps, etc. And then of course the other important part of the app model is isolation, sandboxing/low rights, and deterministic install/uninstall. (it should also make in-place OS upgrades more reliable)

We've started deployment to ~1600 computers last week, at the behest of those users. So there is clearly some interest regardless of your person prejudice against it.

Personal? Yes. I don't find the interface changes worth the switch at this time. Not much increase in productivity and the minor under-the-cover improvements are not whelming enough to warrant a change at this time. My wife uses it and find it okay, but considering she works for the company that makes it, it's not a exactly a personal choice. She likes the GUI, but not all the changes to the various apps and utilities.

Professional? As a company and all the hundreds of clients/corporations that we write software for and tens of thousands of their users, there has been almost no demand for Windows 8 specific or Metro style software. And we constantly survey and ask questions about their needs and expectations. Yes we are planning to support Windows 8, but it's more of "have to" than a "want to". We have Windows 8 in developer and tester hands. But there's more interest in smart phone apps, web apps and server apps than desktop. And the desktop apps are all full bore apps, not Metro.

How many of your 1600 users asked specifically for Windows 8? How much is IT/management mandated? How large is the training budget? How many of the new UI features will be utilized by users. What resources will be used to develop/purchase Metro-style apps?

I'm rather sure that's a fake. The desktop tile's background doesn't match the actaul desktop, the accent color doesn't match the accent color used in perferences and elsewhere, IE11 refers to itself as the RTM release of ie10 and even points to the KD article about ie10's relase, the defauls settings looks like a pretty obvious hackjob with photoshop with bad spacing and everything, and it refers to itself as win 8 pro in multiple places

I'm rather sure that's a fake. The desktop tile's background doesn't match the actaul desktop, the accent color doesn't match the accent color used in perferences and elsewhere, IE11 refers to itself as the RTM release of ie10 and even points to the KD article about ie10's relase, the defauls settings looks like a pretty obvious hackjob with photoshop with bad spacing and everything, and it refers to itself as win 8 pro in multiple places

I doubt it's fake. I do think it's nowhere near complete however. Hence some of the issues you're pointing out. It makes sense that this would leak considering it's due for a release by end of the year or so.

We've started deployment to ~1600 computers last week, at the behest of those users. So there is clearly some interest regardless of your person prejudice against it.

Personal? Yes. I don't find the interface changes worth the switch at this time. Not much increase in productivity and the minor under-the-cover improvements are not whelming enough to warrant a change at this time. My wife uses it and find it okay, but considering she works for the company that makes it, it's not a exactly a personal choice. She likes the GUI, but not all the changes to the various apps and utilities.

Professional? As a company and all the hundreds of clients/corporations that we write software for and tens of thousands of their users, there has been almost no demand for Windows 8 specific or Metro style software. And we constantly survey and ask questions about their needs and expectations. Yes we are planning to support Windows 8, but it's more of "have to" than a "want to". We have Windows 8 in developer and tester hands. But there's more interest in smart phone apps, web apps and server apps than desktop. And the desktop apps are all full bore apps, not Metro.

How many of your 1600 users asked specifically for Windows 8? How much is IT/management mandated? How large is the training budget? How many of the new UI features will be utilized by users. What resources will be used to develop/purchase Metro-style apps?

We have deployed a couple dozen so far only at user request. Absolutely none of the change is mandated, we're barely finishing moving to 7 officially. We have no training budget, I have no idea what UI features they will utilize as we haven't started to figure out how to modify it. No resources will be used to develop apps in our department, we're a K-12 school division, we don't make any kind of app at all.

People ask for windows 8 in our environment and we provide it. They want to use it, and we're happy to have some test users to help us fine tune our long term plans, it's a hell of a lot better than only giving it to IT and listening to them bitch about how it's not all CLI or something useless.

The desktop is slowly but surely being relegated to niche status. It's nowhere near that yet, but I'm pretty sure by revision 5 or so, it will be.

They'll never switch to Windows RT if the users don't follow. No users, no money. The issue is that all the reasons people stick with Windows don't apply to Windows RT/Metro. Legacy apps, windowing, hundreds of settings, program management. It's antiquated and it's subpar and disorganized, but then they should fix that instead of creating a second platform grafted on Frankenstein-style. People pay for that freedom and 'inefficiency' when they buy Windows/x86, it's a feature, not a bug.

So the desktop will live on, it's a UI style that is optimized for traditional productivity. Windows RT can be adapted to fit desktop computing, but right now there's no sign that MS is changing course. They seem to be 'doubling down' as Ballmer is so fond of saying.

I watched the Cringely Jobs uncut interview from 1995 yesterday (it's on Netflix). I'm not a machead, don't like Jobs much, but I like history and it was interesting and Jobs was amazingly prescient. What was absolutely brilliant is when it came to Jobs talking about Sculley. Jobs said there are product people and they drive a company's early success and then when you're already successful, it's more about sales and marketing, and those folks get in all the meetings and take over leadership and that's how companies lose their way. IBM and Apple he was pointing to, but now I'd say MS. Ballmer was from sales. Windows RT was not a good product, even if it had been able to run all the x86 programs. It has fewer first party apps than Windows 7. It has no windowing, didn't run on 7" tablets, didn't have WP8's good apps, didn't have the best games, didn't interoperate with xbox, handles multitasking poorly for a desktop OS, wasn't backwards compatible. It's fine for some people, but MS's goal was making a competitive mobile platform, and in that it's a failure.

What was also brilliant was when Jobs said they underestimated IBM, not because the products were any good, but because so many other people were invested in their success. He probably was referring to MS there, and now MS is exactly like IBM was. Now a lot of people are invested in Microsoft's success, and they can afford these costly mistakes, but there is a limit.

I remember when I did the compulsory marketing paper (for my business degree) at Uni the lecturer gave examples on combining either a bad product with good marketing or a good product with bad marketing. While saying neither was better they at least made money from the bad product because people bought it (depending on return rates). Less repeat customers though.

Thankfully Windows 8 is becoming a better product over time. I liked it at the start but I'm liking it more all the time.

What I really want from it at the moment is an app to manage our Media Centre box in the other room for live TV through the tablet, recording management etc.

I watched the Cringely Jobs uncut interview from 1995 yesterday (it's on Netflix). I'm not a machead, don't like Jobs much, but I like history and it was interesting and Jobs was amazingly prescient.

So prescient. Wrong a bunch of time too, but able to change his mind (on a dime, rather famously) and steadfastly right on a bunch of things that remain true and very relevant today.

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So the desktop will live on, it's a UI style that is optimized for traditional productivity. Windows RT can be adapted to fit desktop computing, but right now there's no sign that MS is changing course. They seem to be 'doubling down' as Ballmer is so fond of saying.

Changing course to what? Splitting the two UIs into separate OSes? That won't work, W8 hybrid & tablet devices aren't selling close to the number needed to ensure Metro/"W8" momentum—and momentum is critical against iOS and Android. I see few good options other than solidering on, iterate and improve where improvements can be found and work toward unifying Windows across phone and tablet/PC, while waiting for the x86 chipset (via Intel's fabs) to become more competitive with ARM, which will make W8 tablets more compelling.

Yes. I can see how the last three operating systems having it in the same exact place is so confusing.

Nobody opened up Explorer in Windows 7. Everyone just dragged the shortcut into the startup folder in the Start menu. If this isn't blindingly obvious to you I don't know what to say. (What compounded it was that the shortcut was in C:\ProgramData and not the user start menu.)

Your brilliant people apparently are not so brilliant.

And no, everyone didn't drag the shortcut into the startup folder, I used just what LordDaMan posted and had been doing so now for many years, because, get this, it works.